1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a monitoring method and apparatus for an Aeronautical Radio, Incorporated (ARINC) 653-based operating system and, more particularly, to technology for debugging and monitoring avionics software (SW) which complies with an ARINC 653 standard among system software components used for aircraft systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Software used for aircraft systems requires high reliability and productivity. Due to these requirements, research into an operating system suitable for a special situation in which high reliability and safety are regarded as the most important thing is being conducted.
In particular, the concept of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) has appeared and a large amount of research into IMA has been conducted. IMA has been applied to avionics software standards, such as ARINC 653.
ARINC is an acronym for Aeronautical Radio, Incorporated, which is a non-profit organization owned by the United States, and has five fields (aviation, airports, national defense, government, transportation) as principal business areas. ARINC has first applied computer networks to police cars and railroad cars, and has defined standard specifications for communication services and avionics standards between ground stations and aircraft.
IMA is an acronym for Integrated Modular Avionics, and is composed of a large number of applications having different safety levels in the case of aircraft. IMA was introduced as technology for the safety and efficiency of these applications, so that applications and hardware are prevented from being mutually influenced by each other when the applications and hardware are developed or executed, thus reducing development costs of hardware or applications.
ARINC 653 is an interface between a system core and an application implemented for IMA, and is a technical standard for defining the real-time operating system of digital avionics systems defined by ARINC and application programs executed on the operating system.
A large-scale system, such as aircraft, is composed of a large number of application programs and processes. In ARINC 653, the concept of partitions is used so as to perform spatial partitioning and temporal partitioning of each application program. Spatial partitioning means that each separate partition does not influence physical memory resources of other partitions. Temporal partitioning means that temporal resources allocated to each partition cannot be interfered with by other partitions. Such a concept of partitions may prevent an error in one application program from negatively influencing the entire system in an environment in which an important duty is performed, such as that of an avionics system, thus providing high reliability.
Aircraft systems have evolved from various conventional computing environments that are independently configured (federated systems) into IMA structures for integration into a single system. Accordingly, the ARINC 653 standard has been established as system software (SW) for IMA in international aviation industries, but there is a limitation in that a monitoring model for avionics system software complying with the ARINC 653 standard has not yet been developed.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,019,980 discloses a display monitor for avionics systems, but technology disclosed in this U.S. patent merely presents technology related to an interface and an interface card between a Personal Computer (PC) and the buses of an aircraft system from the standpoint of the data buses of the aircraft system, but has a limitation in that technology for monitoring and debugging ARINC 653 standard-based software (SW) is not provided.